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Not Apple's fault that there are no drivers for Pascal, the last nVidia GPU they used was a Kepler. The only reason there are drivers for the Maxwell based GPU's in the 900 series plus the 750's is that nVidia wrote them. nVidia may have seen some advantage to write the Maxwell drivers as their cards could be used in the 2009-12 Mac Pro's, but may have decided the effort was not worth it for what are now 5 year old machines.
This lack of support for Pascal GPU's might change if Apple picks nVidia as the supplier for discrete GPU's in a future Mac model. But Apple has been picking AMD discrete video for the last couple years for what they use in the dual GPU MacBook Pro's and the iMac's.
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Apple has 3x the cash to buy all of Nvidia's stock at today's market cap. Nvidia would make drivers if Apple wanted them enough.
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And what would Apple want them for? Makes absolutely no business sense for Apple, they are not using any nVidia GPU's in current models. The only thing the drivers would be good for is in connection with a model of Mac Pro that has not been sold for 4 years.
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So are you willing to accept it's Apple's fault that there are no drivers?
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No, I would call it nVidia's fault. Their GPU's have not functioned as well in the dual-GPU role needed on the high end MacBook Pro models. The only fault I would ascribe to Apple is their failure to keep some of their models like the Mac Pro up to date. nVidia has failed to keep their chips attractive to Apple for some time, that failure flows downhill on them.
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Not necessarily, but they are constantly giving you LESS computer for MORE money.
Most base models are pathetically lean on specs, and then Apple wallops you on upgrade price to give you what they know you needed all along. Now with soldered RAM it becomes even more of an issue because you can't even upgrade.
So no it's not that Macs are so expensive, they just are NOT making them to fit the needs of the "common man". They are either not powerful enough or unnecessarily expensive overkill.
You can build a really nice Hack for under 1000 bucks, what would a similar Mac Pro cost?
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fauch wrote:
You can build a really nice Hack for under 1000 bucks, what would a similar Mac Pro cost?
Trick question.
Your $1,000 hack isn't comparable to a Mac Pro.
This isn't 2013.
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Toe get something even close to a low end Mac Pro with a decently powerful GPU would be more in the $1500-2000 price range as a hack. Once you go beyond the 4-6 core CPU setups, the results are mixed on getting a hack up and running on OS X, and the price quickly escalates unless you can find suitable used parts.
